Are you waiting for the family to arrive? Are you sure you've got the room to spare inside? - Slade, 'Merry Xmas Everybody', 1973.

An essential part of my Christmas is for my dad and I to have a late-night heart-to-heart about electricity. On the night of Christmas Eve, as I sit on the sofa staring at my phone, he'll decide to go upstairs to bed, but before he does he'll give me a detailed rundown of exactly which electrical appliances need to be switched off, which ones need to be turned off at the wall and which ones need to be unplugged. It's unclear whether he's trying to save a few pence on the quarterly electricity bill or he fears that we'll all perish in an electrical fire in the dead of night, but it's a serious business and one I show respect for, despite inwardly wondering what the big deal is. I would never say, 'Hey pops, what's the big deal,' partly because I wouldn't dare call him pops, but also partly because I'm not too old to be given a thick ear.*

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Spending Christmas in someone else's house, even if it's a house you lived in as a child, requires great consideration and understanding as you adapt to new ways of doing things. Mealtimes may come bizarrely early or distressingly late. Central-heating thermostats might be set to 'Greenland' or 'Congo', depending on the tolerance of your hosts to extreme temperatures. People may disappear to bed before the ten o'clock news. Possessions may be tidied away when you're not looking, leaving you hunting for stuff that you only put down for a second or two. Children returning to the family nest may be accused of treating the house 'like a hotel', but if only they could. At least then they might get a choice of pillows, and be allowed to wander around the building during the night without being confronted by an alarmed parent wielding a hammer.

'When I spend Christmas Eve at my parents' house in Dunstable, I sleep in a single bed in my sister's old room under a duvet decorated with flowers'

The environment that awaits us after Driving Home For Christmas is a familiar one, in that there are (hopefully) friendly faces we've known all our lives. But it can also feel very alien. Furniture may have been changed without our approval. Old habits may have been replaced by eyebrow-raising new ones. You may be shouted at for leaving a plate on the pouffe. The biscuits may be kept in a different cupboard. Your old bedroom may be referred to as an 'office' because your bed has been replaced by a desk and a wheezing Pentium 4 desktop. You may find yourself thinking, in the words of Radiohead, 'I don't belong here'.

Few things sum up the skewed sense of connection you have with the family home as the place you've been given to sleep. When I spend Christmas Eve at my parents' house in Dunstable, I sleep in a single bed in my sister's old room under a duvet decorated with flowers, and within reaching distance of several ageing soft toys from my childhood. Back in 2011, I posted a picture of this unsettling scene on social media, and it became a kind of cathartic catalyst; hundreds of people began sending me photographs of their own Christmas sleeping arrangements, ranging from the claustrophobic to the creepy to the cheerless. No one sent me pictures of tastefully lit rooms with pristine white bedding and graceful Yuletide embellishment, and if they had I would have ignored them. I wanted to see childhood duvet covers, retrieved from the bottoms of drawers and deployed by parents in a mischievous attempt at low-level humiliation. Ferociously offensive curtains, swirls of brown and orange, held together with bulldog clips in rooms ventured into only once or twice a year. Rooms with stepladders, plastic crates and several hundredweight of car-boot sale fodder: well-thumbed crime fiction, Sanyo cassette players, Ladybird books, broken remotes and upturned furniture partially hidden by tartan throws. Rapidly deflating airbeds, barely the width of the average human body, draped with fitted sheets that don't fit. Sleeping bags dating from the mid 1980s, hideous monstrosities patterned with graphic, grey and red motifs that look like plummeting sales graphs.

Every Christmas Eve for the past six years I've been sent these things, and tradition demands that I sit at my laptop until the early hours of Christmas morning, sharing the spoils. Last year, some genius on Twitter going by the handle of @crouchingbadger came up with a hashtag for it all: #duvetknowitschristmas. It's become clear to me that we're incredibly keen to have a peek into other people's slightly dysfunctional situations – maybe because it helps to reassure us that our own circumstances are just as weird and unorthodox as everyone else's. According to the script, traditional Christmases don't feature elderly grandparents crammed into bunk beds and nephews banished to attics with no heating or lighting. But we weren't consulted when the Christmas script was written. If we had been, we could have told them to make urgent adjustments to incorporate haunted clocks that give us the creeps, or piles of jigsaws that have the habit of falling on our heads at three in the morning. That's the Christmas we know, the Christmas we'll always remember.

*My father has never advocated corporal punishment in the home, so don't call social services about this; they've got bigger fish to fry.